A faith that ruined whole continents and destroyed a world of human
lives

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IN THE END, a "millennium" is too big a concept for
the imagination. A thousand years equals 30 generations, a
duration that has no flesh and blood dimension. Half a millennium
ago, Columbus had just landed in the Western hemisphere; half
that again, America had not yet been born.

But a century has resonance for us, spanning the two or three
lifetimes that we have touched. For example, I can trace my own
grandparents' path back to Moravia and the Ukraine, though I
can't go any further back than that. My grandparents were
married just before the turn of the last century, and their children's
lives began with it. Brief as this interval is in the overall span of
time, three generations is probably enough to understand
ourselves as human beings.

Looking behind us, this century of ours was mostly a stage for the
destructive dramas of a secular religious faith called "socialism." It
is a faith inspired by the dream of a social redemption realized
through human rather than divine power, through the force of
politics and the state. In its communist form, the efforts of this
faith ruined whole continents and destroyed a world of human
lives. Have we learned from these disasters, or will the passions
of this faith follow us into the century to come?

That is my millennium question.

For an answer, I turned to the pages of the
Nation, an institution of the left that participated
in these dramas across the entire century, and
whose editorial stances on each defining
moment of the communist project have been
utterly refuted by historical events. The editors
of the Nation supported the Russian Revolution
and the Stalinist collectivization, the infamous
purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the
Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe and the Maoist tyranny in
China, the communist conquest of South Vietnam and Pol Pot's
genocidal revolution and, of course, Castro's long-lived
dictatorship in Cuba.

During the Cold War to contain the expansion of the Soviet
empire, the editors of the Nation opposed the Truman Doctrine,
the formation of NATO and SEATO, and the efforts of western
military and intelligence organizations generally to stem the Soviet
tide.

Over five decades, the editors of the Nation waged journalistic
war against the defenders of freedom in the West, against
America's "cold warrior" presidents Truman and Kennedy, Nixon
and Reagan. At the same time the Nation was the defender of
Soviet shills and Soviet spies like Harry Dexter White, Owen
Lattimore, John Stewart Service and the Rosenbergs. As recently
as this month -- the last of the century -- its editor was still
defending Alger Hiss.

Like the Bourbons of old, the editors of the Nation seem to have
learned nothing essential and forgotten nothing as well. During the
slow unfolding of the Marxist collapse, the socialist movement
they foster as a faith was often fragmented and surreptitious.
Now, at this turn of a century, the movement itself is more
influential in American political and cultural life than it has been at
any time in the American past. Its adherents reach into the White
House and the Congress; they are the sitting leadership of the
AFL-CIO and of the principal academic, professional, and arts
associations, and of many of the most important media institutions
as well.

In this pre-millennial hour -- December 1999 -- the editors of the
Nation chose to run two stories -- an appraisal of the socialist
century past and a harbinger of the socialist century to come --
that provide the answer to my question.

In the Dec. 13 issue, there is a long review article called
"Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge En Noir [The Red in Black],"
written by the magazine's longtime "European Editor," Daniel
Singer, a godson disciple of the Trotskyist writer Isaac
Deutscher, and the magazine's resident expert on the subject of
the communist experience.

The main focus of Singer's article is "The Black Book of
Communism," a French treatise that attempts to sum up the
human horror of the project to make a better world. According to
the book's authors, during the 20th century between 85 and 100
million human beings were slaughtered in peacetime by Marxists
in the effort to realize their impossible dream. As a foreword by
Martin Malia reasonably suggests, "Any realistic accounting of
communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia."

That is the minimal lesson one might expect to learn from the
unbroken record of the socialist utopias of the century just past.
But it is exactly the lesson the Nation fervently rejects. Writes
Singer: "Our aim -- let us not be ashamed to say so -- is to revive
the belief in collective action and in the possibility of radical
transformation in our lives." He refers to this passion for social
redemption as "the Promethean spirit of humankind," a term that
reprises the precise language Marx used when he launched his
destructive project over 150 years ago.

Socialism is dead. Long live socialism.

For Singer and the Nation, the unrelieved horror and failure of
socialist experiments over the course of a century is not a lesson
in sobriety for those who promoted and supported them, nor a
reason to reconsider the faith. It is just a tragedy of errors that
need not discourage them and need never be repeated. For the
Nation this is the story of "a revolution in a backward country
failing to spread and the terrible result then presented to the world
as a model."

In other words, had there been sufficient communists in America
and Europe to make revolutions there as well, the utopia that
socialists had dreamed of would have been realized in fact. With
communists triumphant everywhere, the Marxist fantasy would
have come true.

And lo and behold, in the very next issue, a Nation editorial,
"Street Fight in Seattle," hails the eruption of political violence in
the state of Washington as a beacon of socialist renewal in the
nation as a whole. The protest against the emerging global
market, the editorial gloats, is "something not seen since the
sixties" -- when the anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-property
forces of the left last took their socialist fantasies and nihilist
agendas to America's streets.

The voices recorded are familiar ones: "A week ago no one even
knew what the World Trade Organization was," proclaimed Tom
Hayden, one of the most destructive luddites of the previous
generation, who did not miss the opportunity to join the
demonstration. "Now these protests have made WTO a
household word. And not a very pretty word."

From generation to generation, the message has not changed one
iota. Declaims the Nation: "A corporate-dominated WTO that
puts profits before people and property rights before human rights
can no longer sustain its current course." It quotes Gerald
McEntee, a leader of the government unions and a major power
in Democratic Party politics: "We refuse to be marketized."
Quoting the famous words of a '60s leader, McEntee proclaimed:
"We have to name the system, and that system is corporate
capitalism."

In other words, the Nation's war is still directed
against a system that in the last 50 years has
brought unimagined well-being to millions of
people previously excluded from all but the
barest minimum of the fruits of their labor -- a
system which is the only creator of democratic
freedoms the world has ever known.

The Nation's mantra -- "Profits before people
and property rights before human rights" -- is
the anathema on the system that was
formulated by Marx and is now resurrected in Seattle. But how is
it possible for any sentient human being to have lived through the
20th century without coming to understand that property rights
are the basis of any rights that human beings have ever been able
to secure, and that far from conflicting with human needs, profits
are the only practical engine ever devised that even
half-succeeded in fulfilling them.

Such willful ignorance does not stem from lack of intelligence, but
has a deeper source in human desires that can only be satisfied by
religious faith. The socialist dream of achieving a kingdom of
heaven on earth is as old as Eden. "You shall be as G-d," was the
serpent's fatal promise then. It is the "Promethean" dream that
Marx identified as his own and that the Nation editors are intent
to keep alive. It is the idea of putting a human design on the
impersonal structures of the social order beginning with the
economic market and extending to the constitutional order. In
wishing this, socialists fail to understand that a market that human
beings cannot control and a political process they are bound to
respect are the very disciplines that human beings require in order
to be human.

Without such restraints and the limits they impose, humanity
quickly descends into the barbarism the 20th century has made us
all too familiar with, yet whose lessons -- as we go into the 21st
-- the Nation and its comrades have not learned.

In the end, is there anything really new under the sun, as far as the
passions that inspire and the reasons that guide us are concerned?
The Homeric epics, which are the first literature of our civilization,
were written three millennia ago, yet they are inhabited by people
whose emotions and calculations are familiar today. The ideas of
Plato and Aristotle, the ethics of the religious founders who lived
more than two millennia ago, pretty much encompass the ideas,
ethics and religious faiths we see around us today.

Call this continuity "human nature." We are bounded by who we
are and what we can learn. In the matter of how we live and
react, what we can learn about ourselves is pretty well set by the
real individuals who connect with us, and by whom we are
touched. One or two, or at most three generations encompass
this extended family of flesh and blood contacts. A century or so
will do it.

So that's my millennial question: Have we learned from the
Marxist disaster of this century, or are we doomed to repeat it in
the
next?